Abstract
Diurnal variations of wind field and pollutant dispersion over the Yosu area under the insolation conditions of summer and winter were investigated by using the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS). Initially, horizontally homogeneous wind field were assumed on the basis of sounding data at the Kwangju upper-air station for days whose morning wind speeds were below 2m/s. In these days, the sea breeze prevailed in summer while the land breeze lasted for a few hours in the morning; the effect of synoptic winds was strong in winter with some inclusion of wind variations owing to the interaction between sea and land. The predicted wind direction at the location of the Yosu weather station captured an important change of the sea-land breeze of the observed one. The predicted wind speed and the air temperature agreed with observed ones in a reasonable range. In the morning, both in summer and winter, winds around the source location were diverged and became weak between the mountainous area to the southeast and the Kwangyang Bay to the north. Winds, however, accelerated while blowing to the east and south and blowing on the mountainous area. Complicated wind fields resulted in high pollutant concentrations at almost all receptors considered. These high concentrations in the morning were even comparable to the ISCST3 calculations with the worst-case and typical meteorological conditions designated by USEPA(1996). On the other hand, in the afternoon, the wind field was rather uniform even in the mountainous area with development of mixing layer and the concentration distributions being close to the Gaussian distributions.
